Interlude
by kickstergal
Summary: There's a rustling from the corner of the room. He turns over, stares at her in the dim light of the basement; she can feel his brain start to tick, to make calculations and adjustments. She stares back, pretending she is a big cat - a tiger, calm and unafraid. Pretending that the man in front of her can't kill her in a heartbeat if he so chose.


She stares deep into space; in the quiet of the room.

She just wants to be who she was. She wants to shake off a bad day by slow dancing in the dark of the kitchen. She wants to feel someone's hand on her shoulder, to feel it trace down her spine, pull her close. She wants to laugh at something, anything, until she's helpless with it. She wants to feel something besides anger and fear.

She wants not to be alone any more, and yet right now the thing she wants most is to be alone. To stop running, to curl up in a dark bedroom and sleep for days on end. To stop talking, planning, thinking, fighting. To just give up and let what will come, come.

She glances around the room, shakes her head at the irony of being locked up in here; forced to hide underground for the week while their trail goes cold. _Be careful what you wish for._

The blanket he foisted upon her last night is scratchy but she pulls it tighter around her; taking care to keep her movements quiet lest she wake the man sleeping on the bed across the room.

She doesn't want to match wits, doesn't want him to give her that look that tells her he has seen too much. She's so tired of being so tough, untouchable, a ball-buster, a hard bitch, all of the verbs men reserve for women they are unable to have and are compelled to want.

It's instinct, now. To slip into the persona, to fix a grim stare on someone, to suddenly break a finger, fire a shot, to make a point or simply to punctuate a sentence. She's beginning to play with people, to speak to them as if they are the best of friends, all the while making the indisputable point that to cross her is to die.

She sighs and rests her head on her forearms, pulling her knees tight to her stomach. She's beginning to admit to herself that she no longer knows who she is, and it is dangerously exhilarating completely, utterly terrifying - terror of the sort that means she's on a tightrope ten stories up with no harness. She doesn't even have the luxury of having a guide on either shoulder; she has her own personal dark angel and she doesn't even know anymore who is leading who or which line they're walking across this time.

There's a rustling from the corner of the room. He turns over, stares at her in the dim light of the basement; she can feel his brain start to tick, to make calculations and adjustments. She stares back, pretending she is a big cat - a tiger, calm and unafraid. Pretending that the man in front of her can't kill her in a heartbeat if he so chose.

"How are you?" His voice is slightly rough from sleeping, but his eyes catch and hold hers, alert to her slightest movement.

"I couldn't sleep." She confesses, because her weakness will sometimes deflect him from asking her what she's really thinking. She waits for him to decide how much of the truth her wants from her, all the while knowing exactly how much she will allow him.

"Can't sleep or won't sleep?" His tone is mild but her ire goes up automatically anyway; he can make her feel petulant when all she wants to be is cold.

"It's too cold in here." She deflects by making a statement that is really a complaint, taking small and petty satisfaction in the guilt that flashes through his eyes.

"Of course." He gets up abruptly, all smooth grace and animal strength, and she wonders that so many people don't see the danger underneath his courtly manner and expensive clothes until it is too late.

She watches him shake out his blanket and carefully lay it at her feet, a gift. An offering. A silent question, one he asks a thousand times, in a thousand different ways. _Do you forgive me?_

She doesn't take it; continues deliberately to watch him. The small, infinitesimal change that she has been waiting for doesn't take long; at her silence, his eyes change, flatten. His posture straightens slightly, and his voice deepens, becomes more clipped. "I know this isn't the Ritz."

It makes her feel powerful, that this powerful man is subtly protecting himself from her.

It makes her feel ashamed; that she craves power now, that the space inside her that used to hold love now holds something cold, and malevolent.

She reaches for the blanket, ignores his comment about their current accommodation. "Thank you."

He watches her lie down, watches her arrange herself with her back to the wall. "You're welcome."

She can't tell if the man or the monster is speaking to her; has the uncomfortable thought that it's both. As she drifts off; she hears him again, files it away as the beginning of a dream, as something she can't feel anything about any way because it's nothing to her.

"Sleep well."

 **A/N: Sometimes I wonder what happens in the spaces between scenes.**


End file.
